Hilary Andersson

Hilary Andersson was born in Austin, Texas in 1967. She was educated largely in the UK, and studied politics at Edinburgh University.

She is the author of the 1991 book Mozambique: A War Against the People.

Hilary joined the BBC as a producer in World Service radio in 1991, and later moved to BBC World TV.

She became the BBC's Lagos correspondent in 1996 and just days after arriving in Nigeria was arrested and briefly detained by the country's military dictator General Sani Abacha.

Her reports included Abacha's death, Mashood Abiola's death and the unrest in Ogoniland.

Hilary went on to become the BBC's Jerusalem correspondent where she covered the outbreak of the second intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, and the war in Lebanon.

She reported from the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan at the height of the American bombings which followed the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Hilary also covered the invasion of Iraq, embedded with the British Divisional Command.

She became the BBC's Africa correspondent in 2001 and began making films for Panorama whilst she was in Africa.

Her Panorama films include an expose of torture camps in Zimbabwe, and an investigation into President George W Bush's attempts to hide the science of global warming.

In a groundbreaking investigation in 2008, Hilary and her team uncovered the first evidence that China has been helping Sudan's government militarily in the troubled Darfur region, where the UN estimates that about 300,000 people have died.

Hilary has won numerous awards for her work including the Royal Television Society (RTS) News Event award 2005, the Peabody Award, the Banff best documentary award, and the Amnesty International Television Documentary 2005 for her Panorama on Darfur "The New Killing Fields".

Hilary also won the RTS Specialist Journalist of the Year award in 2004, and the One World Media award 2005, amongst others.